Customer Reviews
An all-time classic 
2008-07-07
This may be the ultimate classic of its type. Any history of gamimg would have to give considerable prominence to this game. I have not played it in several years but I remember it with great affection. It dates from when Sierra was still producing memorable games. LotR III marks the point where Sierra began producing garbage. Avoid it.
If your computer will handle LotR2, buy it. It's not up to modern standards of graphics and complexity but you will not find more fun anywhere.
A medieval strategy classic - not to be missed 2008-05-20
First off, let me just say that this is really great game. An original, fun, addictive, realistic, and stylish masterpiece. The graphics are a little bit outdated, but they were cutting-edge for their time and are still cool to look at. The gameplay combines real-time strategy battle action (a la warcraft) with management-style strategy (counties, army movements, castle building, farming and resource management, along with population and happiness). Both sides of the game are very enjoyable (although the AI and control of the RTS side could use some improvement. but it's still fun). What makes this game stand out most, however, is its atmosphere & setting. It is very original and unique, in that, despite its' medieval setting, it is very realistic, and you truly feel like you are a noble back in the 1200s. This is my favorite aspect of this game (an aspect that they obliterated in the sequel, sadly)- I am not one who shys away from historically-based games (like assasin's creed, and this), and this one captures that era masterfully. The european-medieval music that accompanies you in the background is some of my favorite videogame music to date. This is the game's intro, which should give you an idea of both the graphics and the feel and style of the game:
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[edit] - Ok, I guess you can't put links in amazon reviews. If you want to see it go to youtube and search for lords of the realm II intro.
So, just like starcraft, the fact that this game is old shouldn't deter you at all from buying and enjoying it. If you love medieval-related stuff, strategy games, management games, or just plain having fun, you should go get this.
Best Strat Ever!!! 2008-04-24
This is the best game ever!
I have played it for thousands of hours, and to think, I bought it in 1996!
I have purchased and played hundreds of games over the last 20 or so years and this is the best, of them all.
It's in-depth and complex game play more than make up for it's ancient graphics.
I would gladly pay $100+ for a graphics updated version of my favorite game of all time! The $20 I spent on the original has paid for thousands and thousands of hours of entertainment, I played it yesterday! IN 2008!!! This game is 12yrs old and still rocks the house...
LOTR 3, which I was excited about for years and bought in advance, was terrible.
The Best Lord of the Realm game 
2007-07-18
You may not be able to find a new copy anymore, but this one is worth hunting down. It's definitely the best out of all of the Lord of the Realm games. It contains both turn-based and real-time strategy elements. The turn-based portions are very impressive, but the real-time elements are not. The game is extremely easy to learn but still strategic and you can become very comfortable with it in an hour's time, so if you're still trying to make sense of the "Hearts of Iron" player's manual, this game is for you.
In this game, you start with one territory and seek to take control of all of the others. You must allocate peasants to various tasks such as farming, ranching, mining, castle-building, and blacksmithing. You must also recruit soldiers from your peasant population and you have to equip them with weapons which can be either made or bought. You must also worry about the tax rate. Income is very important, but high taxes (along with disease and lack of food) make peasants unhappy and they may revolt. Revolts can be easily dealt with, so it's usually beneficial to play with a heavy hand. You must also worry about diplomacy. It's good to keep a few rivals happy and to be aggressive to a few others. However, you don't get to fully control the diplomacy of the country since even rivals that you are good to are quick to backstab you. In addition to your rivals, you have to worry about other random events like droughts and disease. Overall, there are enough elements (this was a non-exhaustive list) to keep things strategic but not so much as to overwhelm the player and you'll keep tweaking your strategy. Personally, I commonly destroy my enemies' cattle and farmland and starve them to death, which makes taking over the county much easier, but it makes it harder to build it back up once you gain control of it.
When two armies go into battle, it is done in real-time. You have the option to auto-calculate results but experienced players will have better outcomes if they handle the battle manually. Unfortunately, the battles are short, the tactics are very simple, and there are no "races" so you'll be fighting very similar forces. Siege battles are kind of fun, but overall I was disappointed with the real-time elements due to the shortness of battles and lack of depth.
One of the nicest things about this game is the user-interface during the turn-based portions. They give you slider controls to manage things and they also provide you with all of the relevant statistics that you need. The interface is extremely intuitive. As such, you can probably learn the game easily without even reading the manual.
There are different difficulty settings, but I didn't find any of them too challenging. If you crank up the difficulty all of the way, you'll be met with a decent challenge; for expert players, the challenge may not be quite enough.
Overall, it's a very nice light strategy game. If the real-time elements had been more impressive, I would have given it five stars.
Note: Runs just fine on XP. Does not run on Windows 2000. I haven't tried it on Vista, but I have a feeling that it won't run. It is an old game.
This one takes me back 2006-11-22
This was one of the first games I really loved (along with Master of Orion and X-COM). It's graphics were pretty good at the time, but it's turnbased gameplay was very addicting. I never finished the game back when I was in college, but I will buy a copy now and try to get through it in 2006. Should be quite nostalgic!
Best game of it's era and genre 2006-04-03
Lords of the Realm II is a mixture of turn-based county and economic management and real-time combat. As the game begins, the king has died and five nobles (including yourself) are vying for control of the realm, including the noble Baron, the headstrong Knight, the ice princess The Countess, and the backstabbing Bishop. You have to hold on to your counties by building larger castles and keeping the peasantry happy and well-fed. When you engage your enemy in battle is when the real fun starts. You are given a Warcraft-type view of the battlefield with the units in your army and have to either get them to retreat (a rarity) or kill every last one of them. In a siege, you can end the battle by capturing the enemy's flag or dispatching all of your opponents soldiers to the great big Realm in the sky.
Dated but fun 2005-12-09
This game is light years behind the games today, but when it was released, it was pretty good. It is still a fun game to play if you like a risk type game of attacking and defending castles. The graphics are pretty plain, but the gameplay is still addicting. The seige pack expansion is also a must. The $30 people are charging for this game alone is too much, for the game and expansion, you should pay no more than $20 total.
Fun if simple game - quite addictive 2004-12-06
This certainly isn't the most exciting game I've played. I had thought it rather simple, until last night when I was explaining it to my roommate who was amazed at the level of detail you could go to. (I don't think he had ever seen any of the Sims games.)
The game is one of strategy, and you'll only enjoy it if you're a medieval buff. In the most general terms, you must conquer all of the counties within a country and become King. There are two smaller kingdoms, and then you hit the real ones: Ireland, England, France, Germany, Italy, and an area they refer to as The Crusades. In order to conquer the counties, you need to manage several things: taxes, weapon building, army building and maneuvering, forestry, castle building and a number of other specifics to build your own budding empire. You need to keep the people that live in your county happy, and this means that they need to eat, and that the appropriate level of taxation exists. If they are unhappy enough, they will revolt, and flee - and you will have lost your county.
When it comes to battles - and there are many - you can choose to either direct the skirmishes yourself (as most do, I'm sure), or in the interest of time you can "autocalc" the battle. The computer then looks at both armies, and determines which should win based on the combatants. For example, if one army contains one hundred peasants, one hundred swordsmen, and one hundred knights; and they face an army with one hundred swordsmen, one hundred macemen, and one hundred knights, the second army will win easily. Why? peasants wield pitchforks.
